Customer Story
Mutua Madrileña
Mutua Madrileña Group, also known as La Mutua, is Spain’s largest insurance group in the Non-Life segment and in health. Transitioning from Nagios to Icinga has elevated their infrastructure monitoring to a higher standard.
With almost 17 million clients spread across various insurance sectors such as car and motorcycle insurance, health, life insurance, and accidents, the Mutua Madrileña group is the leading insurer in Spain. The group’s core focus lies in insurances, complemented by ventures in real estate and asset management. Founded in 1930, the group employed over 1,900 people and posted net earnings of 431 million euros by the end of 2023. Operating as a non-profit organization, the group reinvests its profits to enhance services and benefits for its members.
The Challenge
We needed to refresh our Nagios-based monitoring and gain agility in its management.
Mutua’s maxim since its creation is to offer the best services at the best prices. Mutua Madrileña has set industry benchmarks in cost management. The group’s strategy revolves around value generation, diversification, and growth through an exceptionally efficient business model.
The group’s IT platform is distributed across several datacenters and clouds. Currently they work mainly with Openshift, VMware and Azure as main platforms.
With the goal to gain agility in their monitoring, Mutua Madrileña was looking to replace their old Nagios system. According to Enrique Guerrero Martinez, Linux Systems Administrator, their objective was to adopt a monitoring solution that was platform-agnostic and offered extensive customization capabilities.
In Q1 of 2023, the team around Enrique evaluated different monitoring software. They sought a monitoring system capable of supporting distributed architecture, highly customizable, and dynamically configurable through their automation platform. Additionally, it needed to operate without agents and be licensed under GPL with a substantial user community.
They also aimed for minimal overhead on the monitored machines. As a result, all Linux machines are monitored via SSH in an agentless manner.
The Solution
Taking Icinga into Production
After the decision for Icinga at the beginning of 2023 they proceeded with a proof of concept and completed the migration throughout the remainder of the year. By January 2024, they officially implemented Icinga within their company.
The migration process was straightforward, involving the creation of a POC to monitor five hosts of various types, covering essential services. Simultaneously, they developed automation to split the host configuration into two components: a standardized section automatically generated by Ansible, and another section defining thresholds for each machine.
Enrique explains “Once defined, we wanted to evaluate if a single host could handle all the load and we deployed all the machines with our automation. Of course we had to spread the load, but we wanted to test it.”
Since they had the old monitoring running at the same time as Icinga, they were able to do a gradual migration with no loss of service until the day came to shut down the old monitoring.
As the team is very experienced, the whole migration went like a breeze. All initial problems were quickly solved with a little help from the community.
The process of implementing Icinga was simple.
Enriching Availability Monitoring with Metrics
The most challenging aspect of the migration process was transitioning all templates to utilize the SSH agent instead of the Nagios agent. Additionally, they strategized for incorporating Nagios agents on Windows, necessitating adjustments to Grafana dashboards to accommodate both operational modes. Currently, Mutua Madrileña oversees their Linux machines, services, and OpenShift farms. They plan to expand monitoring to include Windows systems and network components this year.
Their Icinga installation comprises a master and two satellites. The master exclusively monitors balanced services, while the satellites monitor machines within the same zone. Presently, they manage over 800 hosts and 16,000 services, with intentions to scale up to 2,000 hosts and 40,000 services in the final phase.
In terms of integrations, they primarily rely on InfluxDB and Grafana, with notifications routed through Teams. They utilize specific plugins to monitor DB2, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, in addition to extensive in-house development.
We are not exempt from asking questions in the forums. The experience was nice.
Success
After implementing it and presenting it internally, we received very positive feedback from several departments who, once they saw the power, wanted to join and monitor even more services than we initially thought.
Greater Control and Less Routine Work
Following the implementation of Icinga, the team received exceptionally favorable internal responses regarding the new system. Seeing Icinga’s capabilities, many departments expressed interest to participate and expand monitoring. Also Grafana and the dashboarding part was immediately popular.
Now that the team has integrated Icinga into their workflow, it has significantly streamlined the daily tasks of the System Administrators. “Icinga is now used in all of our daily operations and for quick diagnostics in case of problems it is excellent,” says Enrique.
He regards the migration as a major success for the department, greatly enhancing their monitoring capabilities and saving countless hours of routine work. They’ve gained greater control and leveraged dynamic settings to monitor aspects that were previously overlooked. Additionally, pre-emptive alerts have enhanced platform stability.
As of the start of 2024, Mutua Madrileña is embarking on a phase to complete the migration of all Windows and network devices by year-end. Enrique is confident in the team’s abilities to navigate this phase smoothly and address any challenges that may arise. The team enjoys working with Icinga and there is the conviction that “Once you master it, you see more and more opportunities.”
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